“I’ve been listening all the night time. I’ve been listening
all the day (in the words of one of our Jug Band songs).” I have. I have been
listening to Jess Lahey and K.J. Dell’Antonia night and day for weeks. I got
sucked in to their podcast #AmWriting. It is entertaining as well as
informative and just plain fun to listen to.
The podcast is about writing and all things related to
writing and their lives as professional writers. I’m not sure I’d want to be a
professional writer even if I could. I wrote my four little books and self-published
them, but I’m not into self-promotion, agents, book tours and pitching. I’m not
writing in order to buy food. I’m writing just because I want to, because
things occur to me that I want to put on paper and think about out loud.
Maybe I’m just dabbling since I’m not writing for fame or
fortune. I don’t much care if anyone reads what I write. I just want to write
it because I happen to like putting the words on the paper. Lately I’ve killed
way more time listening to them talking about writing than I have spent on
actually “keeping your butt in the chair and your head in the game” – their words
not mine. It’s been months since I’ve written anything new. I spent part of
that time revising and re-revising my first book. I can’t seem to finish with
it. When I read it, I find things that could be phrased better or little errors
which need to be fixed. When I rephrase and fix, I inevitably introduce new cut
and paste errors which must then be fixed in the next pass which introduces its
own set of new errors to fix. It never ends.
When I used to type up tests for one of the professors, I constantly
had to redo my work because he would come back with just a little tweak to make
the questions less ambiguous. Eventually he had to quit rewording because it
was time to hand out the test questions. I need a deadline to force me to cease
and desist. I can’t leave well enough alone. I hope this last updated version
is better than the first. The only one who has benefited thus far is the
publishing company which has produced and shipped six proof copies to me which
I’ve marked up and changed and reordered.
